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At 4.30pm today, Harry Reid announced on the floor of the Senate that, given the complexity and contentiousness of immunity (which he says he backs Dodd in opposing) the bill will not come up before the holidays.

A very wise decision. Thanks are due to Senator Dodd, grassroots support, and your own many calls and letters for emphasizing just how dangerous and outrageous step this would be for any politician seeking to preserve the Constitution. We're not there yet, though, so keep the pressure up: write to your representative and demand that immunity not rise again in 2008!

The Senate showdown over whether to exonerate telecommunications companies for illegally surveilling their customers is underway. Senators Dodd, Feingold and Kennedy have lead the charge. All three made awesome and eloquent arguments for a transparent and accountable government.

Senator Chris Dodd (CT) has been my hometown Senator my whole life; it's great to see him taking leadership on this:

I will ask the Senate candidly, and candidly it already knows the answer: Is this about our security— or is it about (the President's) power?

It's been a roller-coaster few weeks for digital rights activists in Canada. A few weeks ago, rumors began circulating that the current minority Conservative government was going to present a copyright reform act before the New Year.

Unlike previous reform attempts, this new law was preceded by no public consultation. It's long been known that the US government and media companies are pressuring Canada to "normalize" its IP law with its southern neighbour.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a surveillance bill that did not grant immunity to lawbreaking telecoms. At the time, many predicted a bitter showdown, because a different congressional committee had previously passed a bill that granted immunity. That showdown begins now, as the Senate Majority Leader prepares to choose a version for the full Senate to vote upon, setting the stage for a broader battle between granting immunity or rightfully letting the cases against lawbreaking telecoms continue unassailed.

Facebook was the the target of much criticism in recent weeks, thanks to the rapid spread of reports about Facebook's Beacon, a tool that allows third-party websites to send information about user activities back to Facebook.

The controversy began when bloggers reported that their activity on certain non-Facebook sites was showing up on Facebook without their knowledge. The first public version of Becacon would give a user a limited amount of time to prevent a story from being published -- if the user missed the limited opportunity to say "no," Beacon automatically posted the activity to the users' profile. One of the first users to express concern about this automatic disclosure was a blogger who purchased a coffee table from Overstock.com, later finding the purchase reported on her Facebook profile.

The music and film industry continues to pursue its idea of a politically "corrected" Internet - one that they imagine could protect their old business models without requiring any extra costs on their part.

This time, the fix is Internet-wide filtering. In a memo to European policy-makers, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries has called upon ISPs in Europe to filter the content sent across their networks, block protocols used by their customers, and cut off access to persistently infringing sites from the Net (you can read their full memo here). Left unsaid in it was the obvious implication: if ISPs aren't willing to comply, EU regulators should force the ISP's hand.

This week, members of the House Judiciary Committee introduced the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act of 2007," a bill that ratchets up the federal government's role in dealing with intellectual property infringement. While portions of the bill seem legitimately targeted at combating mass, commercial counterfeiting operations, other parts are devoted to little more than protecting the entertainment industry's obsolete business models.

One of the paradoxes of current social software is how many of your closely-guarded secrets you are obliged to entrust to a third party. Take the social blogging site LiveJournal: its centralized server allows you to set blog posts to "friends only" or "private". To use this feature, you post these semi-confidential journal entries to LiveJournal's server, and rely on it to hide your thoughts from the most of the world using its centrally-maintained list of friends to control access. LiveJournal holds your secret data in trust, as much as you trust it to keep your public data available.

We give these companies a great deal of control over our privacy and our speech - and even if we trust that company with those responsibilities now, there are no guarantees that the pressures upon and motivations of that company will stay constant over time.